


Four-Letter Words

by kerlin



Category: Farscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:36:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A year ago, we let a coin make our decisions for us."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four-Letter Words

_"A year ago, we let a coin make our decisions for us." _

Fate.

I hate that word.

It’s a four-letter word, John would say.

When I was first learning English, he had traced the letters for me on my bare back. _Gun_ and _Sun_ in ticklish lines, along the column of my spine and around the curve of my ribcage. Usually when he used that method of instruction, he didn’t get much further than those simple words, because his hands would stray and his lips would follow, and scholarly thoughts would disappear entirely.

But once I progressed past those simple words, I was impatient to learn what all raw Peacekeeper recruits concern themselves with. Standing in line, muscles quivering with exhaustion, you stared in awe as a drill sergeant paced, coiled fury and raw power, and the vocabulary streaming from his mouth in two dozen different languages made you promise to yourself that someday, you too would swear that adeptly.

He had laughed and transcribed the words for me. _Shit_, he wrote, and translated. “Dren.”

_Damn_. “You don’t have a word for it…maybe yotz.”

_Slut_. “Tralk.”

_Fuck_. That one hadn’t gotten me a translation, but a demonstration, and soon enough I had a thorough understanding of that word, too.

“Four-letter words,” he had said, his body sprawled next to mine as I practiced my spelling by drawing words on the planes of his stomach. “On Earth, in English, a lot of swears are four letters long for some reason. So when we say that something’s a four-letter word, that means it’s something we don’t really like."

“One,” I counted, and traced an _f_ along the curve of his ribcage. “Two,” and a _u_ on the smooth skin of his upper stomach. “Three,” was a _c_ around his navel. “Four,” was a _k_, and I never finished that one, because he rolled to pin me beneath him and that particular lesson was over for the night.

And now here I am. The John Crichton who speaks to me of fate now is a different man from the one who taught me those words, and I am a different woman from the one who learned them. Fate has never been kind to me; it has cost me family, friends, and a lover.

I’m not going to play its game anymore. I put myself in the hands of fate once, and that decision has haunted me ever since. Now, I make my own decisions.

"Not again."

"Call it," he urges, daring me as he flips a coin into the air, so much like he did a cycle ago. I find my mouth dry and just watch the spark, the shine of the metal as it spins in the sunlight.

The coin splashes into the water, and I sigh in relief.

Because after all,_ hope_ is a four-letter word too.


End file.
